When a child goes missing - then and now

KEVIN COLLINS CASE

Kevin Fagan

Updated 1:41 am, Sunday, February 10, 2013

Kevin Collins is seen in this undated handout photo.
Photo: Chronicle Files 1984

Kevin Collins is seen in this undated handout photo.

Ann Collins, mother of Kevin Collins, poses with a Newsweek cover depicting her missing son on March 12, 1984. Kevin Collins disappeared in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco in 1984.
Photo: Vincent Maggiora, The Chronicle

Ann Collins, mother of Kevin Collins, poses with a Newsweek cover...

Laura Collins is comforted by her father at a service for Kevin Collins in February 1985, a year after he disappeared on his way home after basketball practice in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of S.F.
Photo: Frederic Larson, The Chronicle

Laura Collins is comforted by her father at a service for Kevin...

Ann and David Collins hold one of their missing posters during a news conference March 2, 1984 in San Francisco,. Their son, 10-year-old Kevin Collins, disappeared Feb. 10 while returning home from basketball practice.
Photo: Paul Sakuma, Associated Press 1984

Ann and David Collins hold one of their missing posters during a...

Police officers line up behind pictures of Dan Therrien during a press conference about Kevin Collins' 1984 disappearanceon Wednesday, Feb. 6, 2013, in San Francisco. Police named Therrien, who died in 2008, as a "person of interest" in the decades-old case.
Photo: Noah Berger, Special To The Chronicle

Police officers line up behind pictures of Dan Therrien during a...

Kevin Collins(far right) is seen with family members in an undated photograph. Courtsey Michael and Jackie Deasy
Photo: Michael Short, Special To The Chronicle

Kevin Collins(far right) is seen with family members in an undated...

A photograph from 1977 shows Kevin Collins(far right) with his uncle Michael, cousin Karen, and brother Gary. Courtsey Michael and Jackie Deasy
Photo: Michael Short, Special To The Chronicle

A photograph from 1977 shows Kevin Collins(far right) with his...

Michael Deasy pauses at the kitchen table at his home in Brentwood, CA, Friday February 8th, 2013, as he and his wife Jackie talk about the unsolved 1984 kidnapping of his nephew Kevin Collins from the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco.
Photo: Michael Short, Special To The Chronicle

Michael Deasy pauses at the kitchen table at his home in Brentwood,...

Michael Deasy holds a copy of Newsweek from 1984 with a cover story featuring his nephew Kevin Collins and his unsolved kidnapping, at his home in Brentwood, CA, Friday February 8th, 2013.
Photo: Michael Short, Special To The Chronicle

Michael Deasy holds a copy of Newsweek from 1984 with a cover story...

Michael Deasy helped run the Kevin Collins Foundation, which assisted in more than 200 child searches but closed in 2000.
Photo: Michael Short, Special To The Chronicle

When it comes to hunting for kidnapped children and conjuring worst-case fates for any boy or girl playing outdoors alone, there is a clearly defined moment in history when everything changed.

That moment came exactly 29 years ago Sunday, on Feb. 10, 1984 - the day 10-year-old Kevin Collins vanished off a San Francisco street.

Before then, parents' precautions largely amounted to telling their children never to take candy from strangers or get into their cars. When a child went missing, police often took their time in the belief that the youngster was probably off on a lark and would soon come home - and the family waited by the phone.

Then Kevin left fourth-grade basketball practice by himself and disappeared from the face of the Earth.

His family formed a search foundation, got milk sellers to plaster the boy's face on their cartons, distributed a half-million flyers nationally and enlisted politicians including then-Mayor Dianne Feinstein in their hunt - a plan of action now so familiar it almost seems routine.

"Kevin's was an incredibly significant case," said Marc Klaas, whose daughter, Polly, was 12 years old when she was kidnapped from her Petaluma home and killed in 1993.

"Back then, they mostly called missing kids runaways, and the police often didn't move too fast on the cases. Back then, there was really nothing for missing kids and their parents.

"But that's all changed now, thank goodness. And it all started with Kevin."

Many changes

The great sadness of 1984 leaped to the fore again last week as San Francisco police said they were focusing on a convicted child molester who lived near where Kevin was last seen. Dan Leonard Therrien, who used many aliases and died in 2008, was interviewed by police at the time, but two witnesses couldn't identify him as the man they had seen chatting with Kevin at Oak Street and Masonic Avenue the night the boy vanished.

Today, there are dozens of child-search organizations around the nation, and some parents are so afraid for their kids that they fingerprint them or compile ready-for-poster dossiers on them in case they go missing. It's the rare parent who lets his or her youngster stroll down the block without supervision.

Legislation driven by missing-children cases wound up on the books all across the country. They include California's "three strikes" law that sends repeat offenders to prison for life, and every state's version of Megan's Law, which mandates an Internet list of sex offenders that parents can access with a keystroke.

The Amber Alert system of notifying the public of kidnappings grew out of a 1996 child abduction and killing, and different police jurisdictions and the FBI now share information more freely than they used to. Law enforcement rarely waits a day or more to investigate abductions, which was the norm three decades ago.

"Law enforcement, the media and the public in general now has a very aggressive response to missing children," said Bob Lowery, a director at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, which was formed three months after Kevin's disappearance.

"Around the time Kevin disappeared, the National Crime Information Center wasn't even accepting missing children information, so one jurisdiction wouldn't know what the other was doing," Lowery said. "Now they are entered immediately into the NCIC. Back in 1984, the recovery rate for most missing children was 60 percent, alive or deceased. Today it is 98 percent.

"That's a lot of improvement."

Maybe a bit much

But some also believe that parents' protectiveness often crosses into paranoia. Despite a string of highly publicized abductions in the 1980s and '90s, statistics show that stranger kidnappings are not as common as many people fear.

Lowery's national missing center, which receives funding and statistics from the U.S. Department of Justice, reports that the overwhelming majority of the 800,000 children younger than 18 who go missing each year are either taken by family members or others they know, or they leave home of their own accord.

About 100 cases a year fit the stereotypical parental nightmare, Lowery said - one in which a child is held overnight, is killed or vanishes without a trace.

"The anxiety that was created among parents was not all a good thing," said Paula Fass, a UC Berkeley professor who wrote "Kidnapped: A History of Child Abduction in the United States." "Back in the 1980s, what was being written in the media was that there were 500,000 abductions every year - but it wasn't broken down.

"So most parents assumed they were all stranger abductions, when in fact the number of stranger abductions is actually very small. It was so severe that in the 1990s there were surveys showing that kidnapping was the No. 1 parental concern, not something like dying in car crashes, which is much more dangerous and pervasive.

"I do hope parents have relaxed somewhat since then," Fass said.

Just trying to search

Kevin's relatives say they never considered the part they played in the explosion of awareness and action in the world of missing children.

"We never thought about that kind of thing then when we were looking for Kevin or actively helping in other searches," said Kevin's uncle, Michael Deasy of Discovery Bay, who helped run the Kevin Collins Foundation. "We were just giving whatever help we could and we learned as we went along."

The foundation assisted in more than 200 child searches, but gradually, the stress of each hunt wore most people out, Deasy said. Many dropped out of the organization in the mid-1990s, and its doors shut for good in 2000.

"It's tough because you get so involved in these cases," Deasy said. "All of them stick out for me because none of the kids came back alive. That's why I finally stopped doing it. It was too much for me."

Anniversary memorial

The family held a memorial for Kevin on the 10th anniversary of his disappearance, and at this point the best they can realistically hope for is an explanation. Not a reunion with their beloved boy - something that has happened only rarely, such as with the rescue of Jaycee Dugard in 2009 near Antioch.

"I really think this guy is the guy who took Kevin," Deasy said of Therrien, San Francisco investigators' newly named "person of interest." "I really wish we could just find some resolution to all of this, finally."

Fass theorizes that one reason paranoia ratcheted up around the time Kevin vanished is that "more and more mothers were going out of the house to work. Fewer and fewer were home with their children, and the idea of child kidnappings played on their fears."

Another, she said, was the growth of 24/7 news cycles.

"I think the media played a real role," Fass said. "They certainly alarmed people in terrible ways by playing up these cases again and again. And when you attached pretty faces to the stories, like Kevin Collins and Polly Klaas, it just escalated things."

Not foremost concern

It's important, she said, to take the attitude that "one child taken is one child too many. But as a culture, child abduction should not be our foremost concern as parents ... not to the point where we inhibit their ability to develop as competent people."

Klaas, whose Klaas Kids Foundation has become one of the nation's leading child-search organizations, said he doesn't necessarily see the attention as a negative.

He said the now-defunct Kevin Collins Foundation gave him crucial help in searching for Polly in the two months between when Richard Allen Davis dragged her from her bedroom and the time her body was found. And as Klaas pushed for the three-strikes law and pioneered the practice of immediately assembling posters for search operations, he found the media spotlight helpful.

"These types of crimes - child kidnappers, many of them sexual perverts - have been going on for many years, long before the 1980s, and society has been trying to fix those people, but nothing seems to work," Klaas said. "The only thing we can do is put these perverts in prison for good. And that means we can't let up."